


Enemy Mine

by prairiecrow



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: Age Difference, M/M, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-03
Updated: 2012-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-30 13:05:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/332023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elim Garak is a man who appreciates the ironies of life, and his relationship with Julian Bashir certainly qualifies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enemy Mine

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place between "Cardassians" and "The Wire".

Elim Garak was a man who appreciated the ironies of life — the exigencies of grim survival had dictated as much even if his temperament hadn't naturally tended in that direction, for if he hadn't found what amusement he could in his lonely and bitter exile he might have taken the punishment to its lethal conclusion and died by his own hand long since. During his time on Terok Nor, later Deep Space Nine, he'd found various targets for his well-honed wit: the petty whining of his customers, Gul Dukat's preening and posturing, the venality and greed of Quark, Odo's humorless and hidebound dedication to justice at the expense of common sense and moral subtlety. Granted, his sallies were only voiced in the privacy of his own mind — he had no one who cared to listen to his private thoughts, rumoured agent of the Order that he was — but he'd learned to take a certain pride in his isolation, flattering himself that it marked him as a man a cut above others even in his present disgraced circumstances.  
  
That had changed shortly after the Federation sent a contingent of Starfleet personnel to the station, and he'd calculated that Deep Space Nine's new Chief Medical Officer would prove a suitable contact within the new power structure: young, swaggering, eager to please, easily impressed, and highly malleable. It was an assessment that had been amply confirmed during his first contact with Julian Bashir, when the boy had stared and stammered and almost jumped out of his skin twice within the first two minutes of Garak's approach. He'd laid his hands on the Doctor's shoulders in parting as an unspoken but clear message:  _I am the dominant one here, child, and I will cross your boundaries whenever it pleases me to do so._  
  
There was a chance he had gone too far, of course, but such risks had always been part of his line of work, and later that night, when Bashir openly approached him in Quark's with a wide and friendly smile, Garak knew he'd struck just the right note after all. The fish was hooked and now all he had to do was keep playing out the line, reeling him in when needed and giving him room to feel free when that better served his purpose.  
  
It was a game he'd played dozens of times before in his long and successful career as an infiltrator, saboteur and spy. But sometime within the first three months of knowing the good Doctor he had realized, quite suddenly and unequivocally, that the hook and the line ran in both directions in this relationship.  
  
It was a shock that had struck him with immediate… not concern, no, concern wouldn't have reflected the magnitude of the situation. What he'd experienced was closer to panic, because he couldn't recall a time in over five decades when he'd felt this quiet, powerful, instinctive connection to another living being — not Mila, not Tain, certainly not the various sexual partners he'd indulged himself with from time to time… and there'd been none of those since coming to this station, which he at first surmised might be part of the problem. But closer examination had revealed that while sexual attraction was part of what he felt toward Bashir (so slender and honey-skinned and delectable, with a throat made for bite-marking and sweetly smiling lips and wide hazel eyes an incautious man could lose himself in), that was only a part of it. Far worse was the personal affinity that had come into being between them during the lunches that Bashir had initiated, the perception that inside that callow exterior dwelt a quick and perceptive mind which, properly schooled, might actually prove capable of outstripping the bounds of Federation dogma and Bashir's own youthful shallowness.   
  
So Garak had become a mentor to him, training him with the cut and thrust of debate and exposing him to concepts beyond the narrow world he had hitherto inhabited. And Bashir had proven an enthusiastic student, always ready to engage in verbal battle with a brilliant gleam in his eyes and an enchanting smile that made the nerves trapped under Garak's skin burn and whisper traitorous suggestions. He never let a trace of that reaction escape… well, actually he did, he flirted with Bashir outrageously from a Cardassian point of view, but he'd suspected that the Human would utterly miss the cues, and in that assumption he'd proved correct as well.  
  
Ironic indeed, the way that slim brown face of a man he'd set out entrap came so often to haunt his dreams entirely against his will. If it had been a deliberate seduction, he could at least have said: "My opponent was more cunning, or more determined, or more skilled in the arts of lovemaking" — for then, while it would still be a personal failing to have lost, he could have claimed that he had fallen to one of superior craft, and in that there was a trace of honour to be clung to even in defeat.  
  
But it wasn't like that at all. Bashir strutted upon the stage of their mutual lives as carelessly as a swallow gliding on the twilight air or a flower blooming in a lonely field, with no intention of seducing a certain rather stout Cardassian tailor (although he certainly set himself to the task of luring women to his bed with an earnest will that only managed to make him more endearing). But in that lack of intention he was succeeding far beyond anyone else who'd ever crossed Garak's deliberately lonely orbit — indeed, his innocence was an enticement that only drew Garak deeper, full of longing to disillusion it and to ruin it, for then perhaps the spell would be broken. Bashir would recoil in disgust, and in that ugly reaction Garak would be set free…  
  
…he knew, however, that things wouldn't work out that way. He'd already seen the less-than-admirable side of Julian Bashir — his pathetic naivete, his relentless lustfulness, his outrageous sense of self-importance and overweening self-satisfaction — and none of that had driven him away, although it probably should have long since. No, taking Bashir firmly in hand and finally daring to fully appreciate his beauty would only bewilder and anger the Starfleet officer, and then Garak would not only have lost the closest thing he'd had to a friendly companion in years, he'd also have placed himself in danger of coming to Commander Sisko's attention in a way that might get him banished from the only home he could lay claim to at the moment.  
  
And that, alas, would be a fate even worse than perpetual unrequited longing. For one thing he'd never see Bashir again, and for another the Order or the Central Command would almost certainly order his termination for failing in the one job they'd still found him fit to perform.  
  
So he continued to play the game as he'd begun it, smiling and jesting and challenging Bashir at every turn with no real hope that he would ever uncover the true mystery, or even realize that it existed. And in his darkest hours Garak accepted the fact that he probably deserved his fate, an exile banished beyond the farthest reaches of his beloved homeland, with only an achingly beautiful and utterly oblivious boy for company.  
  
THE END


End file.
